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Tuesday, April 15, 2014

I received a lot of positive feedback
and great questions from several teachers that are extremely excited to learn
more about vocabulary instruction, so I am answering these three crucial
questions:

1. What does explicit vocabulary
instruction really mean?

While I was explicitly teaching
vocabulary, I quickly learned that it is important to make the distinction
between oral vocabulary and reading vocabulary.

Oral vocabulary can be further divided into listening vocabulary
(receptive vocabulary) and speaking vocabulary (expressive vocabulary).

Reading vocabulary is encountered in text and it is more complex than
our speaking vocabulary.

2. Why is explicit vocabulary teaching so important?

Vocabulary is a strong predictor of reading
comprehension. For our students to understand the text, they must know
what most of the words mean before they can comprehend what they are reading. Children with well-developed vocabularies can recognize a new word in
text faster and easier, if the word has an identity in their mind.

3. How do you choose which words to teach directly?

Isabel Beck and her colleagues have developed a really
nice framework for choosing the most important words that should
be targeted for instruction. She divides words into three “tiers”.

Tier I words are the most common words. Examples:
come, see, happy, table